Possibly one of the most heartwarming phenomenons to come out of movies over the last few years is the adorable comeback of Ke Huy Quan, the actor best known as Data from The Goonies and Short Round from Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. After nabbing an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once and joining the MCU in Loki Season 2, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the endearing actor might want to slow down a bit, however, he’s now headlining his own action movie with Love Hurts, the latest offering from 87North Productions that hopes to add a genuine sense of warmth and love to all the usual stabbing, bone breaking and devastating concussions caused by blunt force trauma.
Can Ke Huy Quan’s comeback continue unabated thanks to a dizzying array of fight scenes and a genuine Goonies reunion, or will thus comedy actioner find itself drowning in mushy stuff?
Marvin Gable is a simple kind of guy with small dreams and a big heart as he throws everything he has into his real estate business to provide care and understanding for his customers. Yep, life is pretty uneventful for the diminutive guy and the only real chores in his life is trying to keep his clinically depressed assistant, Ashley and wondering why someone is going around town defacing his ads by scribbling moustaches on his face.
However, this is only a prelude to the shit storm that is about to hit, because it turns out that once upon a time, Melvin was a lethal assassin who took case of business for his crime boss brother, Knuckles, and he only managed to get out of that life by performing one last hit of Rose, his sibling’s lawyer who was caught stealing cash. But the big twist is that Melvin didn’t actually kill her as fell in love with her and let her go under the understanding that she disappeared and never returned.
Well guess what? She came back and she seems to be locked in a vendetta to get revenge on Knuckles while trying to convince Marvin to embrace his former persona as a ruthless killer that can crack more skulls than a wonky skateboard. As a result Marvin suddenly has to try and balance his picturesque existence with a sudden influx of thugs who have been paid to end his life. But even if he can make it pass the brooding, knife slinging Raven, he still has to square up to Knuckles’ right hand men, King and Otis, who all take turns at trying to remove Marvin from this plane of existence by repeatedly hitting him really hard.
However, Marvin doesn’t want to find himself sliding back into bad (and incredibly dangerous) habits but the harder Rose tries to get him to embrace his old self, the more Marvin has to fight for his life. As if Valentine’s Day wasn’t stressful enough…
The endearing nature of Ke Huy Quan comeback has been one of the more sweeter success stories to come out of cinema and it feels that Love Hurts is a very obvious attempt to harness the actors two major talents; to be almost unbearably nice and to display a truly impressive ability to whup some ass with some lightning fast martial arts. However, I’m kinda bummed to report that while the film features some legitimately stunning fight sequences that feel like they’re trying to channel the energy and inventiveness of 80s Hong Kong Kung Fu pictures, the rest of the film falls flatter than a multitude of stuntmen who faceplant themselves selflessly for the greater good.
The main problem is the cartoonish tone that’s cartoonish enough to wear a big dopey, romantic heart on its sleeve, but still wants to deliver broad, violent action beats with plenty of blood splattered about the place.
However, first time director and former stuntman Jonathan Eusebio seems to find the juggling of competing tones isn’t as simple as it looks as his superlatively staged brawls weirdly refuse to gel with the comedy scenes. A main issue is that whenever the leads aren’t trying to kill one another, the film simply isn’t that funny as it tries to spoof the types of saccharine love stories that attempt to suggest that even bloodthirsty murderers deserve to find love. Thus we get the usual parade of eccentric, comic book assassins who fling banter as much as they fling throwing knives; only the banter is nowhere near as sharp as the script thinks it is and even though some of the actors try hard to draw something out of the material (one killer has marital problems, another writes Poe-like Goth poetry) but the majority of it just feels as forced as a submission hold and just as painful. Speaking of arm twisting grapples, can anyone get Ariana DeBose’s agent in some sort of headlock, because between her appearance in this and Kraven The Hunter (where she both awkwardly plays laywers with the most clunky dialogue imaginable) is probably going to do her career more harm than Marvin punching a guy with cookie cutters lashed to his knuckles.
However, holding it all together with a sincerity that feels oddly refreshing is Quan, who among the half baked jokes and some infantile plotting that makes the likes of The Hitman’s Bodyguard or The Big Hit play like Heat, manages to strike the correct balance between benevolent and badass. It also helps that the movie includes a cameo from fellow Goonie Sean Astin whose in-movie congratulations of Quan also seems to double up as a truly moving moment where it seems that his old cast mate his complimenting him on scoring the lead in a movie.
However, while the plot and humour may lead you to think that Astin may be a little premature with his celebration, Love Hurts actually makes up a fair amount of ground when it comes to the action which proves to be legitimately fantastic. Of course, the production house that gave us the likes of John Wick, Atomic Blonde and (the very similar) Nobody should be giving us superlative fight sequences, but while every gloomy action movie and it’s dog is working overtime to give us gritty, bloodsoaked battles to the death, Love Hurts instead tries to offer up more complex, humorous scraps that feel more in the vein of Jackie Chan’s 90s output that sees the impressively nimble Quan take a stupendous pounding while busting out some great moves. It also helps that a lot of the bad guys have bizarre gimmicks to keep things quirky like giant blades smuggled in shoes and a guy that likes to kill people with rigid plastic straws (other good reason to drink from paper ones, folks) and the movie seems tailer made to have people simple isolate the fights in order to stick them up on YouTube to save people from wading through the rest of of the film to appreciate them.
The fact that Ke Huy Quan has scored a leading role in an action comedy should have been a reason to celebrate; but while this Valentine’s set romp delivers some truly magnificent brawls, everything else in the movie equates to nothing more than a dull date. When it comes to meek dudes becoming warriors, Nobody does it better…
No literally. The 2021 film Nobody does this far better.
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